At first, you may equate actress Paula Plum with comedies. She has a warm laugh and a keen sense of humor. But then you remember that she’s capable of conjuring up her inner Phedre (suicidal one moment, homicidal the next) and an icy Lady Macbeth (“What’s done is done.”).

And now she dons the boxing gloves to play Martha in Edward Albee’s masterpiece: his scathing portrait of a boozy couple that’s tearing its marriage apart at the seams. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” runs Jan. 13 to Feb. 12 at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston.

What’s a nice woman like Paula Plum doing in a play like this?

“I’m going downhill,” she says with a laugh. “I’ve hit the gin bottle. What can I tell you?”

It’s a credit to her range as an actress that Plum can perform the work of the full spectrum of playwrights, from Neil Simon to Neil LaBute.

“It’s fun to be at a place in my career where I can jump around and play a variety of characters,” says Plum, a Medford resident who’s been gracing Boston stages since the 1970s. “I never thought of myself as a chameleon, but looking at my resume, it turns out that’s what I do. I can transform. I say without hubris that I’m one of those people who has a lot of range.” And then she adds with a laugh, “I play both victims and bitches with equal ease.”

Her powers of transformation were probably never more on display than when she tackled the role of the 17-year-old boy in “Sidekick” – he’s a conjoined twin with cerebral palsy. To create the character, Plum went all Marlon Brando. A few strategically placed cotton balls in her mouth helped her affect a speech impediment and change the structure of her face.

The result? Plum was on stage for 2 minutes before her own brother realized he was watching his sister.

“That shocked me,” says the actress. “I realized how that kind of physical choice can inform your character and change you utterly.”

If there are cotton balls in her mouth during “Virginia Woolf,” it’ll be to stop the bleeding. It was a little more than 50 years ago that the drama opened on Broadway and set a new standard for speaking truths and swears. Albee reminded audiences that theater didn’t need to be pretty and safe, and in the process, he moved himself to the front of the class.

In the play, we follow George and Martha during a nightlong alcohol-fueled descent into recriminations and regrets, shared fantasies and shattered illusions. Deep wounds provoke savage attacks. And no one’s more capable of hitting your soft spots than the one who knows you best.

Despite the brutality of it all, Plum, surprisingly, talks about the playfulness she’s discovered with costar Steven Barkhimer, who plays George.

“The play isn’t just a bitter diatribe,” says Plum, who hasn’t performed in the play before, but directed it once. “George and Martha really know how to entertain each other. Albee really captured the sense of a couple that knows each other so well. Even in the darkness, there’s a huge amount of comedy.”

But Plum isn’t blind to the venom. In fact, she was once asked to play Martha opposite her actor-husband Richard Snee, and she declined.

“I didn’t want to do it,” she says. “I regretted the missed opportunity to work with my husband, but I didn’t want to bring it home.”

It’s not that Plum is strictly a Method actor. It’s just that you can’t inhabit the world of George and Martha week after week without some kind of emotional repercussion.

“It’s a painful place to go,” says Plum. “I don’t ‘live’ the characters – it’s not like I’ve been drinking since August. But this is very different than doing a light-hearted comedy. I’m trying to stay mentally balanced and healthy, but, yeah, there is darkness. There’s a certain dread in surrendering yourself to that much vulnerability.”

One way to lighten the mood is through humor. In rehearsal, one of the younger actors said to Plum, “You play drunk so well.”

“I’m drawing from personal experience,” replied Plum.

When it comes to experience on local stages, few rival Plum. She’s worked at the prestigious theaters and won all the available awards. She, along with Maurice Emmanuel Parent, was just named interim co-artistic director of Actors’ Shakespeare Project. She also snags the occasional movie role. Maybe you saw her in Woody Allen’s 2015 film “Irrational Man.”

But now Plum is back on a local stage, where her Martha is just trying to get along with George. Or not.

Asked if she and Barkhimer must modulate their fights in order to make them more palatable for an audience, Plum says, “Actors can’t really say, ‘I’m going to make this more palatable.’ My obligation is to go-for-it as much as the role requires.”

After suggesting there will be no punches pulled in this “Virginia Woolf,” Plum quotes a Bette Davis line that suddenly seems appropriate: “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”